VABERT-EyeBERT

A Named Entity Recognition (NER) model specifically designed for Visual Acuity (VA) extraction from clinical ophthalmology text. This model is fine-tuned on EyeBERT, a domain-specific BERT model for ophthalmology.

Model Description

VABERT-EyeBERT identifies and extracts visual acuity measurements from clinical text, enabling automated processing of ophthalmological records and reports.

• Base Model: qnguy3n/eyebert-base
• Task: Token Classification (Named Entity Recognition)
• Domain: Medical - Ophthalmology
• Language: English

Requirements

transformers >= 4.25
huggingface_hub >= 0.14
torch

Installation

Download the base model:

huggingface-cli download qnguy3n/eyebert-base --local-dir models/eyebert-base

Verify your environment:

import transformers
import huggingface_hub

print(f"transformers version: {transformers.__version__}")
print(f"huggingface_hub version: {huggingface_hub.__version__}")

Usage

Basic Inference

import torch
from transformers import AutoModelForTokenClassification, AutoTokenizer

# Load tokenizer and model
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("qnguy3n/eyebert-base")
model = AutoModelForTokenClassification.from_pretrained("qnguy3n/vabert-eyebert")

# Check label mappings
id2label = model.config.id2label
label2id = model.config.label2id

def predict_ner(text, model, tokenizer, verbose=False):
    """
    Predict NER spans for input text using BIO tagging
    """
    encoding = tokenizer(
        text,
        return_tensors="pt",
        truncation=True,
        max_length=512,
        return_offsets_mapping=True
    )

    offset_mapping = encoding.pop("offset_mapping")  # ✅ remove before model call
    encoding = encoding.to(model.device)

    model.eval()
    with torch.no_grad():
        outputs = model(**encoding)

    predictions = outputs.logits.argmax(dim=-1)[0]
    tokens = tokenizer.convert_ids_to_tokens(encoding["input_ids"][0])

    labels = []
    for token, pred in zip(tokens, predictions):
        if token in ["[CLS]", "[SEP]", "[PAD]"]:
            continue
        labels.append(model.config.id2label[pred.item()])

    # rebuild a BatchEncoding-like object for the util
    encoding["offset_mapping"] = offset_mapping

    spans = get_ents_from_bio(
        tokens=encoding,
        labels=labels,
        sent=text,
        verbose=verbose
    )

    return spans

# Example usage
text = "Visual acuity: Right Eye: 6/5 Unaided Left Eye: 6/6 Unaided"
spans = predict_ner(text, model, tokenizer)

Intended Use

This model is designed for:

• Extracting visual acuity measurements from clinical notes
• Processing ophthalmological medical records
• Research in clinical NLP for ophthalmology
• Automated structuring of unstructured clinical text

Limitations

• Trained specifically for ophthalmological text and may not generalize to other medical domains
• Performance depends on text format and notation conventions
• Requires domain-specific tokenizer (EyeBERT) for optimal results

Citation

@misc{vabert_eyebert,
  title={VABERT-EyeBERT: Visual Acuity NER for Ophthalmology},
  author={Nguyen, Quang},
  year={2024},
  publisher={Hugging Face}
}

License

Apache 2.0

Contact

For questions or issues, please open an issue on the model repository.